©Ij? darfon ibaitftfal 
(ill? Gkrium Imtntiful 
@ The Garden Beautiful and The Garden Bountiful. 
GARDEN has been the hereditary birthright 
of man since Adam in Eden. The mists of 
ages obscure the origin of cultivated gardens 
but they have always been associated with 
people of civilization and refinement. The 
transformations during these centuries bring 
us to a golden era in which the luxury of 
gardens is enjoyed by more people than 
ever before. City toilers, tens of thousands 
of them, in whom the love of nature has not 
been wholly stifled, are now enabled, through the aid of rapid 
transit, to live in suburban and country towns and to indulge in 
man’s inherited passion for a plot of soil to till, plan and control, 
where home surroundings contribute to the health, physique, 
comfort and pleasure of the entire family, the joy of all being es¬ 
pecially centered in the garden — your garden and little kingdom! 
Here Mother Nature moulds herself to your ideals and training, 
yielding your chosen flowers, fruits and vegetables. You then 
live, and “on the fat of the land,” not only in summer but also 
in winter, for many garden products may be stored up for future 
use, as squirrels store nuts, and bees store honey. The fruits 
and vegetables of summer being even more enjoyable in winter 
when gathered and preserved from one’s own garden. What a 
comfortable feeling to have a liberal reserve of such good 
things, in gratifying variety between seasons, nutritious, whole¬ 
some and of known purity. In cellar, pit and barn may be 
stored apples, beets, cabbage, carrots, celery, onions, parsnips, 
potatoes, pumpkins, salsify, squash, turnips, etc., all keeping 
in their natural state as plump and fresh as if just out of the 
garden, and in addition to the above, with domestic co-opera¬ 
tion for the canning, preserving, pickling and evaporating, 
which under the newer methods with improved jars, etc., is now 
so simple and successful, a great variety of the more tender and 
delicious fruits and vegetables may be enjoyed “between seasons,” 
as asparagus, string and wax beans, limas, sweet corn, cucum¬ 
bers, mushrooms, green peas, spinach, tomatoes and a host of 
other good things. 
But the voice of the croaker is heard : “ Just as cheap and 
much less trouble to buy these things in stores .” Yes, if one is 
satisfied with the adulterated, poisoned mysteries sold in stores, 
they are “less trouble,” but home quality and home purity are 
not often found in commercial canned goods. Home quality 
includes not only superior varieties or kinds of vegetables and 
fruit put up, but at the right stage of maturity. Home quality 
canned peas will be the deliciously rich wrinkled marrow peas 
canned when young and tender; commercial brands are usually 
round, hard-shell field peas (they yield more), allowed almost 
to ripen, then “ soaked ” to bulk; up, sweetened with coal tar 
saccharine and dyed green with poisonous copperas, they are then 
“salable.” Home quality canned com will be real sw’eet com, 
gathered when a pressure of the thumb nail shows the kernels 
full of “milk,” then “put up” sw^eet, tender and luscious. 
Home quality canned tomatoes and catsups will be put up 
in glass, with “just ripe” tomatoes, the solid, sweet, meaty 
fellow’s that need no thickening. Commercial canned tomatoes, 
put up in dangerous tin, are too often half ripe and rotten ripe, 
adulterated one-half or more with pumpkin, dyed red with coal 
tar aniline or cochineal (dried insects), preserved with some 
injurious “preservative” and sweetened with saccharine; such 
stuff, beautifully labeled, is salable. And so w r e could continue 
to draw comparisons through the long list of fruits and vegetables 
preserved for future use. 
We do not know all of the “tricks of the trade,” but enough 
to agree to Mrs. Rorer’s statement in her valuable little book 
“Canning and Preserving” — “In this age of adulteration, we 
know not what we eat , and as canning is such a simple operation , 
it is unfortunate that so many people use food put up in factories . 
We presume Mrs. Rorer refers only to factories whose food pro¬ 
ducts are adulterated, for we cannot think that all commercial 
canned goods are adulterated; at least some canners send out 
pure goods, and others honestly believe that the “food pre¬ 
servatives” so extensively used are what the compounders 
claim: tasteless, non-poisonous, innocent productions. A re¬ 
cent examination, however, by the Chemistry Division of the 
U. S. Department of Agriculture shows that fifty-five of the 
sixty-seven samples analyzed contained poisonous or injurious 
chemicals. The report sums up by saying, “dependence cannot 
be placed on the claims of dealers in food preservatives .” 
